Finding the right practitioner to treat you with IPL is not an easy task. This is a real dilemma for rosacea sufferers as we do know that IPL is Excellent for Rosacea.

Woman scarred by skin treatment

Kate Bastians, The West Australian, Updated January 21, 2012, 3:00 am

Perth women are being left with scars and severe burns caused by amateur beauty therapists performing a popular hair removal and skin treatment without proper training.

A Joondalup woman has told how her chest resembles a chequerboard of excruciatingly painful burns after receiving Intense Pulsed Light treatment for sun spots two weeks ago.

…

The woman, who received the treatment from a woman who had set up a home business, feared she would be scarred for life and wanted to warn others about the complications that may arise from the treatment.

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The WA Australian Medical Association and the Cosmetic Physicians Society of Australasia have called on the Health Department to introduce standards for the booming IPL industry, which is unregulated.

…

The Department of Consumer Protection received 21 inquiries and 10 complaints about IPL last year, which included reports of burns and scarring. That was up from 15 inquiries and one complaint in 2010.

Chris Goodwin, director of the Australian College of Beauty Therapy in Perth, said people were buying cheap IPL machines off the internet and using them on people without appropriate training.

"They think it sounds like a great money-making exercise and they get two days training and that’s it," she said. "There are too many cases where people are getting badly burnt and I think the Health Department needs to act."

AMA WA vice-president Richard Choong said there had been an increase in reports of people receiving burns from IPL treatment as it became more readily available.

Related Articles

• IPL London Spa Burn Victim Awarded Tens of Thousands in Damages
• News anchor gets burned by photo facial
• IPL burns from "Top London Spa"
• Photoderm Blisters: First, Do No Harm
• What is the difference between IPL and Laser?

Happy New Year to everyone who reads Rosacea Support !

As we start 2012 lets look briefly at what was popular in the last year.

Most popular posts in 2011

Following are the 5 most popular posts in 2011 for new comments. All of these posts have been on the blog for a couple of years, proving that they are still interesting after all this time.

1. How to Cure a Red Face (facial erythema or redness) 189 comments
2. How to cure a Red Swollen Nose 114 comments
3. What is the Best Moisturizer for Rosacea ? 118 comments
4. Just How do you Kill Demodex Mites ? 629 comments
5. Clinique Redness Solutions: user reviews 95 comments

New Posts

There were 93 new posts written in 2011 whereas Rosacea News put up 108 new posts during 2010.

Search Terms

Most new visitors came to the blog searching via Google. You may be interested to know that the most popular search terms were;

• rosacea pictures
• rosacea support
• prosacea
• demodex mites
• zenmed reviews
• rosacea treatments over the counter
• ocular rosacea

This list may be surprising to you perhaps, especially if you have never yourself looked for information on these topics.

Even though these were by far the most popular search terms, there are plenty more ! I am often surprised by the hugely varying array of things that people are searching for on the internet. The full list of search terms seems to never end!

Traffic

Overall in 2011 there were around 976,666 Visits, 739,129 Unique Visitors, and 1,927,057 Pageviews. Those numbers all don’t mean too much – but hopefully show that the site contains stuff that people actually want to read.

Looking Forward

I wish everyone a great 2012, with continuing success is everyones’ battle against rosacea.

Even more, I wish for more treatments options, and easily accessible knowledge about existing options.

Thanks for your support of the site,
David Pascoe, January 2012.

Of course we know this treatment as Sansrosa. Other names we have seen over the years include COL-118 and CD07805/47. The active ingredient in the glaucoma treatment of mentioned is Brimonidine Tartrate.

Gel that stops you from getting a red face in middle age

By PAT HAGAN

Last updated at 9:44 PM on 12th December 2011

A new gel could help banish the redness suffered by people with the skin condition.

The gel contains a drug widely used in eye drops to treat glaucoma, the disease that can cause blindness, which works by constricting blood vessels.

When used in the eye, the drug makes blood vessels shrink and reduces pressure that can cause vision problems.

Now researchers have reformulated it into a gel that can make blood vessels in the surface of skin contract, reducing the red and flushed appearance that many rosacea sufferers endure.

Scientists at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, used the new gel on 122 rosacea sufferers once or twice a day for four weeks.

Within 12 hours, there was an improvement in redness, according to results published in the British Journal of Dermatology.

The journal item mentioned in this article is detailed here: Once-daily topical brimonidine tartrate gel 0.5% is a novel treatment of moderate to severe facial erythema of rosacea: results of two multicenter, randomized and vehicle-controlled studies

Related Articles

• Final FDA Approval of Sansrosa, expect 15 months post Phase III
• Sansrosa not Susceptible to Tolerance or Rebound

In 2008 we heard about Charlotte Cripps, a writer for the The Independent was badly burned by an IPL treatment at a London Spa.

Today we read a follow up article that tells us that Ms Cripps may be permanently scarred.  Ms Cripps has been awarded a `five-figure sum’ as compensation and is also calling for tighter controls on who can perform IPL treatments.

I may be permanently scarred: Woman left covered in burn marks after cosmetic treatment calls for tighter controls on private therapists

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

Last updated at 8:16 AM on 6th December 2011

Charlotte Cripps was off to a private beauty therapist for a lovely session of pampering when a botched procedure left her forever ‘permanently scared’.

The arts writer underwent Intense Pulsed Light treatment – where light is used to smooth the complexion – for a newspaper story three years ago.

‘I couldn’t put a duvet over me or anything because it was just so raw and painful,’ she told the BBC’s Inside Out London programme, which was broadcast last night at 7.30pm.

The writer for The Independent spent months in pain after the treatment in 2008 and has now been given a five-figure sum in compensation by the spa’s insurers.

She said: ‘I think there should be laws brought in so you can’t have IPL or Botox unless it is administered under the supervision of a doctor.’

Related Articles

• IPL burns from "Top London Spa"
• News anchor gets burned by photo facial
• pain, swelling and redness after pulse dye laser treatments
• Photoderm Blisters: First, Do No Harm
• IPL numbing cream BTL better than EMLA

The FDA announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved 35 new medicines in fiscal year 2011. They included “important advances for patients, including: two new treatments for hepatitis C; a drug for late-stage prostate cancer; the first new drug for Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 30 years; and the first new drug for lupus in 50 years.”

The Good News

Highlighting the good news parts of their announcement are the following extracts;

FDA: 35 innovative new drugs approved in fiscal year 2011

FDA NEWS RELEASE

For Immediate Release: Nov. 3, 2011

Report shows quick approvals of safe and effective medicines occur in the United States before other countries

• Two of the drugs – one for melanoma and one for lung cancer – are breakthroughs in personalized medicine. Each was approved with a diagnostic test that helps identify patients for whom the drug is most likely to bring benefits;
• Seven of the new medicines provide major advances in cancer treatment;
• Almost half of the drugs were judged to be significant therapeutic advances over existing therapies for heart attack, stroke and kidney transplant rejection;
• Ten are for rare or “orphan” diseases, which frequently lack any therapy because of the small number of patients with the condition, such as a treatment for hereditary angioedema;
• Almost half (16) were approved under “priority review,” in which the FDA has a six month goal to complete its review for safety and effectiveness;
• Two-thirds of the new approvals were completed in a single review cycle, meaning sufficient evidence was provided by the manufacturer so that the FDA could move the application through the review process without requesting major new information;
• Three were approved using “accelerated approval,” a program under which the FDA approves safe and effective medically important new drugs quickly, and relies on subsequent post-market studies to confirm clinical benefit. For example,  Corifact, the first treatment approved for a rare blood clotting disorder, was approved under this program; and
• Thirty-four of 35 were approved on or before the review time targets agreed to with industry under PDUFA, including three cancer drugs that FDA approved in less than six months.

Some Perspective

Sansrosa hasn’t even been submitted to the FDA for approval, but when it does, it will need to sit alongside these sorts of drugs, waiting to be approved.

Reading about the sorts of drugs that have been approved and the conditions that they treat, kind of puts the rosacea community’s waiting in perspective a little bit don’t you think ?

We can so easily get tied up in knots obsessing about why new drugs take so long to be approved.

Full Report

For more detailed information about the drugs that the FDA approved see the PDF: FY 2011 Innovative Drug Approvals

Related Articles

• FDA gets tough with Allergan over Aczone
• Final FDA Approval of Sansrosa, expect 15 months post Phase III
• 9 New Drugs in Development for Rosacea
• Why Do New Drugs take SO LONG to be Developed?

Are you searching for a natural therapy to quickly relieve your symptoms? Would you be willing to try freshly crushed pineapple and cottage cheese on your face?

Ellen Marmur, MD has an article today from Dr. Oz called Food Solutions for Your Skin.

This natural remedy suggests that the Bromelain from near the skin of the pineapple, can reduce redness, and the milk fat from cottage cheese can soothe the skin. Also a Green Tea soaked cloth is suggested as a way to relax your eyes.

Introducing Bromelain

I haven’t seen a lot of discussion the pineapple extract Bromelain in the rosacea forums. So does it offer any possible benefits to rosacea sufferers?

We are told that Bromelain is not suitable as a oral supplement because it doesn’t make it through the stomach.

But according to Bromelain: biochemistry, pharmacology and medical use (PDF link : CMLS, Cell. Mol. Life Sci. 58 (2001) 1234 – 1245);

“Bromelain is orally absorbed and generates various pharmacological systemic effects: prevention and reduction of edema antiinflammation, stimulation of monocytes to secrete cytokines such as Il-1b and TNF-a, induction of phagocytosis and cytotoxicity by
granulocytes, inhibition of platelet aggregation and stimulation of fibrinolysis, immunomodulatory effects promoting antigen-unspecific tumor cytotoxicity, among others.”

Anti-Swelling and Anti-Inflammatory

This published paper tells us that Bromelain has demonstrated anti-swelling, anti-inflammatory and anti-thrombotic properties.

Interestingly Bromelain promotes the absorption of antibiotics and is thought to have some positive effects for cancer patients.

Some of the effects of this chemical are thought originate from the genesis of pineapple as a member of the Bromelaid family, which are typically carnivorous, tropical jungle plants which grow on other plants and need to derive nitrogen and phosphorus from digesting organic material.

My Take

Bromelain looks to have some quite interesting and unique properties, but more research is needed to discover how well it addresses the inflammation of rosacea.

Bromelain is considered generally safe, but as with all things you read on the internet – proceed with care. See also the American Cancer Society’s page on Bromelain for more background information.

Article from Dr. Oz:

Food Fix for Rosacea: Cottage Cheese and Pineapple

Try mixing one cup of full-fat cottage cheese with a quarter-cup of minced pineapple and applying it like a mask to your cheeks and nose for 10 minutes a day, twice a week for one month.

Place a nice cool washcloth soaked in green tea over the mask to soothe your skin.

The milk fat in the cottage cheese will moisturize and heal your skin.

The pineapple will provide bromelain – richest in the tougher part of the fruit near the rind or skin – to decrease redness.

When taken in homeopathic pills (such as mixed with arnica to decrease redness and bruising), the bromelain doesn’t make it past the digestive acids in the stomach so it is much better to use it on your skin!

You can also drape a green-tea soaked cloth over your eyes for a relaxing 10-minute rest.

Related Articles

• Do Naturopathic or Homeopathic treatments work for rosacea?
• NYTimes says no natural treatments for rosacea
• The Top Natural Rosacea Treatments
• Natural Anti-inflammatory Therapies for Rosacea

1. Internet Searching leads to greater anxiety for melanoma sufferers

Of course everyone is now using the internet to read up on everything health related. You may be headed for some unnecessary anxiety though, so be careful.

Internet Use and Anxiety in People with Melanoma and Nonmelanoma Skin Cancer

Dermatologic Surgery, Volume 37, Issue 9, pages 1252–1259, September 2011

… One-third of participants with melanoma, but many fewer participants with NMSC, reported higher anxiety after Internet use …

Internet use is prevalent and increasing sharply in individuals with skin cancer. The majority of individuals describe their use of the Internet as a positive experience. Greater anxiety from searching the Internet is more common in individuals with melanoma than in those with NMSC.

2. Channel 4 Food Hospital wants Acne Sufferers

The producers of this new show say that the idea is “to explore the possible health benefits of everyday foods in targeting a wide range of medical conditions and symptoms.” For those following the influence of diet on health it will be interesting to see how the mainstream media tackles the idea of treating disorders with food.

The assistant producer wants to “speak to people who might be interested in knowing more about ‘The Food Hospital’. This could be people who are living with a condition which affects their life, or people who have recently started to experience symptoms they wish to address. One condition we are interested in looking at is acne.  We would love to feature someone who suffers from acne in the series and go into the scientific underlying causes of the disorder and potential ways of treating it using food.”  Contact me for more information.

Also see Medicinal diet under microscope in The Food Hospital for more info.

More from the weird and wonderful world of clinical trials and the mysterious Placebo Effect.

We know that somehow even dummy pills can kick-start the body’s recovery engine. This latest article from WIRED tells us that drug developers are noticing that over time that the placebo effect is increasing.

Drugs that once clearly outperformed placebo are losing their edge. Also an increasing trend of new drugs in development are unexpectedly failing to outperform placebo.

How is this possible? Read on to find out.

Encouraging News

One good thing for consumers is that the FDA mandates all new drugs must outperform placebo in authorized blind trials. Thus drug companies must come to grips with the placebo effect (or perhaps better called placebo response as we read below) in order to be able to develop new drugs.

The encouraging bit of this is that we will discover and be able to prove our body’s in-built recovery and healing ability.

Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.

By Steve Silberman 08.24.09

From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent. The failure rate in more extensive Phase III trials increased by 11 percent, mainly due to surprisingly poor showings against placebo.

…

Half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials drop out of the pipeline due to their inability to beat sugar pills.

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Last November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson’s disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, was abruptly withdrawn from Phase II trials after unexpectedly tanking against placebo.

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Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.

Why is This So ?

…

Now, after 15 years of experimentation, he [Bendetti] has succeeded in mapping many of the biochemical reactions responsible for the placebo effect, uncovering a broad repertoire of self-healing responses. Placebo-activated opioids, for example, not only relieve pain; they also modulate heart rate and respiration. The neurotransmitter dopamine, when released by placebo treatment, helps improve motor function in Parkinson’s patients. Mechanisms like these can elevate mood, sharpen cognitive ability, alleviate digestive disorders, relieve insomnia, and limit the secretion of stress-related hormones like insulin and cortisol.

In one study, Benedetti found that Alzheimer’s patients with impaired cognitive function get less pain relief from analgesic drugs than normal volunteers do. Using advanced methods of EEG analysis, he discovered that the connections between the patients’ prefrontal lobes and their opioid systems had been damaged. Healthy volunteers feel the benefit of medication plus a placebo boost. Patients who are unable to formulate ideas about the future because of cortical deficits, however, feel only the effect of the drug itself. The experiment suggests that because Alzheimer’s patients don’t get the benefits of anticipating the treatment, they require higher doses of painkillers to experience normal levels of relief.

Benedetti often uses the phrase "placebo response" instead of placebo effect. By definition, inert pills have no effect, but under the right conditions they can act as a catalyst for what he calls the body’s "endogenous health care system." Like any other internal network, the placebo response has limits. It can ease the discomfort of chemotherapy, but it won’t stop the growth of tumors. It also works in reverse to produce the placebo’s evil twin, the nocebo effect. For example, men taking a commonly prescribed prostate drug who were informed that the medication may cause sexual dysfunction were twice as likely to become impotent.

Finding a Way Out

Big Pharma wants to know why more and more of their drugs are failing to beat placebo.

Under the auspices of the FNIH, Potter and his colleagues are acquiring decades of trial data—including blood and DNA samples—to determine which variables are responsible for the apparent rise in the placebo effect. Merck, Lilly, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi-Aventis, Johnson & Johnson, and other major firms are funding the study, and the process of scrubbing volunteers’ names and other personal information from the database is about to begin.

In typically secretive industry fashion, the existence of the project itself is being kept under wraps. FNIH staffers² are willing to talk about it only anonymously, concerned about offending the companies paying for it.

…

In standard trials, the act of taking a pill or receiving an injection activates the placebo response. In open/hidden trials, drugs and placebos are given to some test subjects in the usual way and to others at random intervals through an IV line controlled by a concealed computer. Drugs that work only when the patient knows they’re being administered are placebos themselves

Ironically, Big Pharma’s attempt to dominate the central nervous system has ended up revealing how powerful the brain really is. The placebo response doesn’t care if the catalyst for healing is a triumph of pharmacology, a compassionate therapist, or a syringe of salt water. All it requires is a reasonable expectation of getting better. That’s potent medicine.

I’d recommend reading the whole article: Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.

Why Should I Care?

All rosacea sufferers need to be aware of the powers of the placebo effect, as it needs to be included in all evaluations of new treatments.

If a new treatment can’t demonstrate that it is superior to placebo, well then we might be better of taking sugar pills (or just using the inactive vehiclie in a topical) and hoping for the best.

Related Articles

• Do Naturopathic or Homeopathic treatments Work for Rosacea ?
• Placebo Treatments work even if you know they’re fake
• The Placebo Effect is a very strange thing indeed
• Interesting note on the Placebo Effect

Why the misery of ‘adult acne’ could be caused by blushing

By LAURA TENNANT

Last updated at 12:35 AM on 9th August 2011

… I asked to be referred to a dermatologist at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. He advised me that it was bad for my general health to remain on antibiotics long-term, and that I should first finish the course and then come back.

When I returned, I was treated by a different dermatologist, who prescribed another course of antibiotics, plus a topical treatment containing zinc, Dalacin T.

Two months on, with my skin no better, I returned to Dr Williams, who told me about another treatment option — a low dose of Roaccutane, or isotretinoin, a medication originally developed to treat brain and pancreatic cancer.

It has a three-fold effect, preventing hyper keratinisation, slowing down sebum production, and also serving as an anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial.

It is commonly prescribed for rosacea in Europe — but not here. She agreed that I was a suitable candidate.

The effects last for many years and in some cases are permanent.

While the drug itself costs under £25 for a month’s supply, patients must also commit to monthly consultations to undergo blood tests (to check liver function) and a urine test (for pregnancy, since roaccutane is strongly contra-indicated for pregnancy). For me, the total cost is likely to be about £1,500.

Of course, the cost was a factor I had to consider, but life, I decided, was simply too short to go on suffering for a minute longer.

The change in me has been immediate and noticeable to all around me.

After a month of treatment, I’m fresh-faced, flawless and ready to answer the door to the postman without a layer of foundation.

Because Roaccutane has been associated with depression and even suicide, I’ve been alert to changes of mood. But rosacea responds well to such a low dose of the drug that its rare side-effects become even less likely.

Related Articles

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• DailyMail: Acupuncture, Yoga, Hat and Moisturiser says Daily Mail
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The aim of the creators is to visualise tangible health benefits when taken orally by an adult with a healthy diet. Only human, randomised placebo-controlled trials were used to create this graphic.

Information is Beautiful: Snake Oil?

(click on the image for a much bigger view)

I recommend having a long slow look at the graphic. Here are some hints to unlock its dense beauty.

How To Read This

Here are some hints on how to read this graphic:

• This image is a “balloon race”. The higher a bubble, the greater the evidence for its effectiveness. The supplements are only effective for the conditions listed inside the bubble.
• The size of the bubble represents how many Google search hits there are for this supplement. Don’t be fooled into thinking that the size of the bubble relates the effectiveness of the supplement; it merely shows how often people are looking for more information using the internet.
• The creators have marked the some supplements in yellow, designating them as ones with low evidence, but promising results – cocoa, NAC, beta glucan, arginine, l-lysine, noni, astaxanthin and tumeric for eg.
• You might also see multiple bubbles for certain supplements. These is because some supplements affect a range of conditions, but the evidence quality varies from condition to condition. For example, there’s strong evidence that Green Tea is good for cholesterol levels. But evidence for its anti-cancer effects is conflicting. In these cases, we give a supplements another bubble.

If you visit the source web page Information is Beautiful: Snake Oil?, you can also see the data used to create the graphic.

My Thoughts

I was surprised by how few bubbles contained a health condition. Could it really be true that so few supplements have been matched to diseases? Maybe that is exactly why the graphic is sub-titled Snake Oil.

Also interesting  to see how many bubbles are located below the line marked “worth it”.

So one summary from this graphic is that the majority of supplements probably really are snake oil.

What Did You See?

A picture really is worth a 1000 words. So much information can be presented by one image.

What did you “see” that surprised you?

Related Articles

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